It’s Time To Turn the Tables on this Presidential Bully

Something is very wrong in the world when the most dogmatic and inflexible president in recent memory can make unreasonable demands of his GOP budget opponents and yet be confident they’ll be blamed for the impasse.

It is past time Barack Obama be held accountable for his intentionally irresponsible fiscal policies that are guaranteed to take us into national bankruptcy. It is outrageous enough that he is steering us into insolvency, but it is unbearable that he’s fraudulently blaming the Republican Party for it to boot.

This is not a close call, and reasonable people, if they understood the facts, would not support Obama. The problem is that so many people who trust him, inexplicably, look no further than his disingenuous statements and the liberal media’s slanted reporting, and the Republican Party leadership simply cannot seem to get its message across. It would help if they evidenced more faith in the wisdom of their own approach.

This isn’t complicated. Our financial problems are overwhelmingly a result of excess spending, not of insufficient tax revenues. Increasing rates or decreasing deductions won’t make a speck of difference, and Obama knows it.

Our $16 trillion national debt and our $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities are going to destroy this nation in relatively short order if we don’t take drastic remedial action.

Yet Obama’s plan is to increase taxes on the highest 2 percent of income earners while refusing to make significant reductions in discretionary spending or to restructure entitlements. His life’s ambition is to fundamentally transform the nation, which depends on keeping the federal spigot spewing and punishing the “wealthy.”

You could say it is crazy talk to suggest Obama doesn’t want to bring our fiscal house in order, but I say, based on the evidence, it’s much crazier to pretend he has any intention of balancing the budget.

To keep his shell game going, he has to divert the people’s attention from the real culprit, spending, and toward blaming and demonizing the rich, and the red herrings of “balanced approach,” “loopholes” and “revenues.”

Obama is the one who won’t agree to a “balanced” approach; he’s ignoring spending and entitlements. When he calls tax increases “revenues,” he is implying that increasing rates and eliminating deductions for a small fraction of income earners is going to appreciably raise revenues and help solve our problem. It won’t. When he refers to legitimate tax deductions as “loopholes,” he is further defrauding the public into believing that these high-income earners are somehow cheating by availing themselves of deductions the law reasonably allows.

Speaker John Boehner must quit adopting that same misleading terminology and conceding, in effect, that the “wealthy” are undertaxed. He is not doing himself or the nation any good by playing into Obama’s hands and allowing him to control the language and the narrative.

Boehner needs to turn the tables on Obama and go into attack mode himself. There is no other way to deal with this destructive bully. Boehner must sprint to the national microphone and tell the American people that Obama is being unreasonable, reckless and uncompromising.

Obama is the one who won’t address the only problem that matters: spending. He won’t budge from his intolerable demands that Republicans raise rates on the “wealthy” in exchange for his vague promise of implementing spending “cuts” in the future, his insistence on spending more money on new programs today, his steadfast refusal to put entitlement reform on the table, and his demand that he be given unilateral authority to raise the budget ceiling at his whim.

Boehner must point out that Republicans have gone out of their way to compromise — way too far out of their way — by agreeing to eliminate deductions for the highest income earners to the tune of $800 billion, a figure Obama himself demanded not long ago. He should say he agreed to that not because he believes they’re paying too little (they are indeed already paying more than their fair share) or that it will increase revenues, but in a good faith effort to secure an agreement from Obama to greatly reduce spending and restructure entitlement programs.

The GOP majority did not get re-elected to roll over to Obama’s disastrous policies. They have a moral, legal and constitutional duty to resist Obama’s path of destruction with every fiber of their beings. At some point, their desire not to look mean must yield to their duty to inform the American people of the gravity of our situation and how reckless Obama is being.

Face it: Unless Republicans accede to all of Obama’s unreasonable demands and thus to the accelerated destruction of the country, there will be an impasse, because Obama will not yield, and Republicans will be blamed for it.

The only conceivable way Republicans can avoid this fate is if they quit playing his sinister game of negotiation chicken, call him out in plain terms on what he’s doing, and show he has never been and is not now serious about averting a national financial meltdown.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, “The Great Destroyer,” reached No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at: www.davidlimbaugh.com.